I've used this website called Voicebase.com. It probably does a hair better then adobe. It is also free. And online you can search the text and it will tell you where the text is temporally.

There is also "get" which will do a text search of your video, but doesn't create any sort of text doc. It actually finds words and praises in the waveform. I find I can get what I need out of these tools working on docs.

What Shane said. And don't bother with Nuance's MacSpeech Scribe either-- really lame. Requires tons of training and really the only way to use it is to be an echo-- listen to the speaker, dictate it into Scribe (or for that matter, MacSpeech Dictate from the same company) and then edit to correct. Since these products give you limited voice profiles, this is a decent workaround-- it's just your voice. But these systems are not complete automation by a long shot. They are toys.

Software for $100- 300 is not going to outperform a human transcriptionist at this writing.

I would love to be corrected. This, along with tracks in FCPX is one of the holy grails.

But on a related note, what method do you all like to use, to write voice-over copy, for a video file?

Do you just playback in FCP, or QT in one window, and type in Textedit in another window? e.g.

And go back-and-forth between windows?

I know at TV stations, many use a product that estimates words-to-seconds, based on how you do settings for the speaker's speech pattern.

Is there something where the video file is in one part of the screen, and you type in another part?

The other day, I saw a nice App for iPad for making a video Podcast. It puts your narration file in one part of the screen, and your iPad camera in another part, so you can record yourself reading like from a Teleprompter.

I was thinking something like that for being able to write voice over narr for a video, video and typing box on one-screen.

Joe Brown Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Find a court reporter. We email an audio file and
> get a text file back. Not expensive either. I
> have a friend who uses this approach for CC.
>
> JB

I second that. Normal estimate I've gotten is 4 hrs@ $25/hr to do 1 hour of audio. Mine takes somewhat less, and is so pleased to get crystal clean audio she calls it a treat.

In the Olden Days (OS9) you could then just copy/paste the text file for each answer into the 'comments' column, size the width, and FCP would text wrap it. Made cutting interviews a breeze. I had hoped PP would bring this back, but it seems to be a lost cause. Sigh...

"Dragon Dictate for Mac (V. 4) is packed with a host of new features and enhancements and for the first time, now includes the powerful capability to accurately transcribe an audio file of any single speaker's voice from podcasts or pre-recorded audio files. (Boldface theirs). It's now a 64-bit app.

We have a new player from an old friend, Digital Heaven -- Martin Baker's SpeedScriber-- recently out of beta. VERY promising. You still need to edit, but a speedy text editor is provided, it's FAST. Supports multiple speakers.

Second Speedscriber of you're reading this thread and looking for answers. We recently used it on more than 200 interviews with all kinds of accents and it worked really well. As Loren says you have to go over the results, but it gets you a long way down the road at about 10 times real time.